Up-and-coming actress enjoys success in German cinema
CAIRO: Isis Schabana successfully combines all-Egyptian looks with all-German fame. The actress, who has an Egyptian father and a German mother, grew up in Germany, where she is now growing in popularity.
With her big brown eyes, petite figure and long black hair, Schabana naturally attracts people, and while you may not expect it talking to her, she is a down-to-earth person that puts you at ease.
As a young girl, Schabana had a passion for acting, which she expressed by featuring in a few plays in high school. After high school she moved to Washington D.C. for a year where she enrolled in drama courses, and it was then that she decided to focus on acting as a career and moved back to Germany to attend the Drama School of Hamburg.
Schabana acted in two movies and a music video clip upon graduating from drama school. Her real breakthrough, however, came in 2002, when she took the role of Felicitas Hagedorn-Maldini, known as Feli, in the popular German soap opera “Marienhof, which has been running for more than 10 years.
On the show, Feli was a sophisticated fashion designer who had been switched at birth returned home with the wrong parents. When she grows up and learns the truth, she is torn between staying with her rich parents or returning to her middle-class roots and her biological parents.
Schabana left the show in 2005 after gaining a great deal of experience about many acting techniques, as well as knowledge of lighting and cameras.
She speaks of acting as being an innate feature of herself, describing her talent, saying, It’s just there inside of me and has always been my dream.
She finds acting a unique art in which everyone has his or her own story to tell. It is also the most interesting thing in life as every day you discover new sides of yourself.
However, Schabana points out that actors have to differentiate between the themselves and the character they are playing, which she sometimes finds difficult to do.
Schabana is about to begin work on two movies – one at the end of 2006 and the other at the beginning of 2007. One of the movies is an international production called “Breathfold, which is a gangster comedy featuring an all-German cast, but will be in English.
When it comes to Egyptian cinema, she enjoys watching the old black and white films, and especially enjoys Omar El Sherif’s movies. It would be very interesting to act in Egypt, but it will also be very difficult because of the language, she says, noting that her Arabic is weak, since she grew up in Germany.
Schabana is also a talented fashion designer, and even considered it for a career when she was younger, but decided to concentrate on acting. She is now, however, working on a clothing line called “Cotton Girl, made of pure Egyptian organic material using her own designs that will be sold in Germany.
In addition to her new project, which will bring her to Egypt regularly, she usually visits around four or five times a year to see her father. During her visits, Schabana leaves to the Sinai for a few days, as she cannot resist its beauty.
[Egypt] is very different from Germany; it s so crazy and alive with many people always around you, says Schabana.
Apart from her Arab looks, Schabana says she feels she has also inherited being a very emotional person, which she describes as her Egyptian side.
For more on Schabana, please visit www.isisschabana.com
